The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (13 page)

We know little of
how the Egyptians navigated the Red Sea, which even today is notorious for its tricky currents and innumerable reefs. Visual observation would have been essential and navigation at night seems unlikely. Northerly winds prevail year-round in the Red Sea as far south as 19°N, well south of Egypt’s modern border with
Sudan, but the best season for a voyage beyond that point would have been between June and September when the prevailing wind is from the north-northwest and blows at a steady eleven to sixteen knots. With favorable winds, a fast passage to
Eritrea might take two weeks or more, and considerably longer northbound, with deeply laden hulls straining against wind and current. Given the dryness of the environment, the ships would have to have carried ample supplies of water, beer, and wine, all of which would quickly go bad in the heat. In addition, food, cargoes, and the ships themselves had to be carried to the port of embarkation, which suggests a highly sophisticated and experienced organization. If
Henu needed three thousand men to launch one ship on the Red Sea, Hatshepsut’s expedition probably required at least five times as many.

Unique though Hatshepsut was as a woman pharaoh, her dynamism was characteristic of the New Kingdom in general and especially the Eighteenth Dynasty (1570–1315
BCE
). Although Egypt had periodically extended its political influence east and west from the Nile
delta and south of
Aswan, prior to the start of the New Kingdom the pharaohs generally refrained from overtly expansionist policies. The reasons for the demise of the Middle Kingdom are not known, but by the 1600s
BCE
most of Middle and Lower Egypt was under
the rule of the
Hyksos, foreigners likely of Syro-Canaanite origin.
Murals at
Avaris, the Hyksos capital in the northwest delta, are stylistically similar to those found on Crete and
Thera and hint at the possibility of a Cretan expatriate community there, too.

The Hyksos seem to have adapted rather than uprooted Egyptian conventions, but they remained an alien elite distinct from native rulers who continued to control Upper Egypt from Thebes. In the 1560s
BCE
,
King Kamose mounted a riverine campaign to wrest Avaris from the Hyksos. His soldiers used their vessels as mobile bases from which they conducted operations ashore rather than for ship-to-ship operations. One incentive for overthrowing the Hyksos was to eliminate them as middlemen in Upper Egypt’s trade with the Levant. In an account of his victorious campaign, Kamose boasts “
I have not left a plank under the hundreds of ships of new
cedar, filled with gold, lapis lazuli, silver, turquoise, and countless battle-axes of metal.… I seized them all. I did not leave a thing of Avaris, because it is empty, with the Asiatic vanished.” The narrative suggests a complete rout of the enemy, but credit for the final ouster of the Hyksos goes to Kamose’s successor,
Ahmose, the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom.

Following the sack of Avaris, the Egyptians pursued the Hyksos into Canaan, a move that signaled a deeper engagement in the region than they had attempted previously. The Near East was undergoing political upheaval thanks also to the westward expansion of the Mitanni kingdom from their homeland in northern
Mesopotamia. Ahmose and his successors remained committed to the region, and in the course of seventeen campaigns
Thutmose III extended Egyptian control as far as southern Syria. The military expeditions to and administration of this territory depended on Egypt’s control of Levantine
ports including
Byblos, Ulazza, and Ardata (just south of Tripoli,
Lebanon), where Thutmose stockpiled matériel for his Syrian campaign. According to
the
Barkal Stela, “Now every harbor His Majesty came to was supplied with fine bread, various breads, oil, incense, wine, honey, fr[uit]…more numerous than anything, beyond the comprehension of His Majesty’s army—and that’s no exaggeration!” On his eighth campaign, Thutmose sailed his army to Byblos, whose stocks of shipbuilding timber would prove invaluable to the next phase of his expedition against the Mitanni. The invasion was largely unopposed until it approached the
Euphrates, where the Egyptians bested the Mitanni in several engagements. When the Mitanni withdrew east of the river, Thutmose launched his prefabricated vessels into the river and proceeded downstream, destroying towns and villages as he went and driving the Mitanni to seek refuge in caves. In bringing the ships up from the coast, the Egyptians drew on their long experience of transporting ships from the
Nile to the Red Sea, a significantly longer distance across far more inhospitable terrain.

At the same time that the Thebans were advancing against the Hyksos in the north, they were also campaigning against the
kingdom of Kush, which had expanded northward from
Nubia. Egypt’s southern boundary had moved back and forth between the First and Second Cataracts since the
Old Kingdom, but the New Kingdom pharaohs’ conquest of Kush was remarkable for its extent and duration. The Barkal Stela recounting Thutmose III’s exploits in Syria was erected at
Napata, twenty kilometers downstream from the Fourth Cataract, which remained Egypt’s southern boundary for four hundred years. The kingdom was now at the height of its imperial reach, which extended 2,200 kilometers from Napata to
Ugarit (Ras Shamra, Syria). The Egyptians concluded alliances with the
Hittites of Anatolia, and the
Assyrians, Babylonians, and Mitanni of Mesopotamia. In the eastern Mediterranean, the consolidation of Egyptian authority led to increased trade not only with Levantine
ports but with Crete, and images of traders in Minoan dress first appear in a tomb painted for Thutmose III’s high steward,
Rekhmire, in which they are identified as “
The People of the Isles in the midst of the Sea.” Interest in the Levant waned under Thutmose’s successors but revived in the Nineteenth Dynasty. At the end of the thirteenth century
BCE
, however, mass migrations swept southward by land and sea and destroyed the established order of the Bronze Age Near East and threatened the integrity of Egypt itself.

The birth, expansion, and longevity of pharaonic Egypt depended on harnessing the Nile as a highway of internal communication, while the seas were a filter through which its people absorbed foreign goods and influences, a buffer against invasion, and a thoroughfare for projecting political and military power. Overland communication with Mesopotamia was possible, but saltwater and freshwater navigation facilitated communication between
Egypt and the region’s leading powers, most of the distance being covered on the
Mediterranean and, after a portage of less than a hundred miles, the Euphrates River. What is most striking about the varied maritime endeavors of ancient Egypt is the impetus they gave to the development of maritime communities across the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, which remained a preeminent center of maritime culture and commerce for nearly four thousand years.

Southwest Asia constitutes one of the most vibrant cultural and commercial crossroads in the world. Overland routes converge there from
Anatolia and the Caucasus, Central and South Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula and the
Levant. Lying at the head of the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia is connected by sea to the lands that ring the Indian Ocean and its subsidiary seas from the Red Sea to the Bay of Bengal. The Tigris and Euphrates also provide a direct connection from the gulf to the heart of Southwest Asia. While these rivers are more erratic than the stately Nile, they were vital arteries of communication by which the trade of the Indian Ocean reached Asia Minor in the north and the Mediterranean in the west. Astride these roads and rivers, the people of Mesopotamia developed some of the refinements of civilization such as writing and city dwelling in the late 3000s
BCE
, several centuries before the start of dynastic Egypt. The
Sumerians and their successor states never achieved the political continuity characteristic of the Egyptians, but the people of Mesopotamia were pioneers in maritime and commercial law, and their oldest literature, including the story of King Sargon’s origins and the
Epic of
Gilgamesh, has echoes in later Greek myth, Judeo-Christian and Muslim scripture, and Persian and Arabic folktales. These stories were carried via the Euphrates to the Levantine coast and from there by ship to the rest of the Mediterranean. Older still were Mesopotamia’s maritime links to the east, via the Persian Gulf to the lands of
Bahrain, Oman, and southern Iran, and the maritime frontier of the
Harappan (Indus Valley) civilization of Pakistan and India, which reached its height in the late third millennium
BCE
. Traces of this long-range traffic, carried out in sailing vessels built of wood or bound reeds, are faint but unmistakable.

Merchants dealt chiefly in precious and exotic goods, however, and such long-distance trade for elite customers could not survive the unexplained downturn in Harappa’s fortunes in the first centuries of the second millennium
BCE
. Little wonder that Mesopotamian merchants and rulers turned their attention to the Mediterranean, which may help account for
Minoan Crete’s great prosperity at about the same time, when the island’s merchants were trading with Greece, the Levant, and Egypt. The
Cretans in turn left their mark on the mainland Greek culture of
Mycenae, which emulated and eventually succeeded them as the dominant culture of the Aegean world. The Mycenaean Age lasted until the
Sea People—the name given to northern migrants of obscure origin—swept through their territories en route to the
Near East and Egypt. The next two centuries evince little of the cultural vitality of the
Bronze Age, but the maritime connections endured and it is along these that we can trace the Phoenician and Greek revival that began in the tenth century.

Situated at the head of the 550-mile-long Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia was the home of the world’s first literate people, the Sumerians, who settled in the region by about 3200
BCE
. Living in small cities, by the end of the fourth millennium
BCE
the Sumerians were probably more technologically advanced than the Egyptians in many respects. If the Nile is a river between two deserts, Mesopotamia is, according to its Greek name, a land “between the rivers.” The Euphrates and Tigris are turbulent streams fed by the snowmelt from the Taurus Mountains of
Asia Minor and the
Zagros Mountains of western
Iran, and prone to chaotic flooding in their lower reaches. About 160 kilometers from the Persian Gulf the rivers merge to form the
Shatt al-Arab, a marshland that separated the southernmost cities of ancient Mesopotamia from saltwater. Dramatic changes in water levels and currents caused the rivers to meander; some cities once situated on the banks of the rivers are now far from them, while other sites have been wiped out as watercourses twitched across them like a garden hose in geologic time. Early efforts to harness the rivers for agriculture and transportation led to extensive canalization, a development that both required and nurtured sophisticated patterns of social organization. This is reflected in everything from the laws governing the control, use, and navigation of canals to the Mesopotamian pantheon.
Enki, one of the Sumerians’ most important deities, is portrayed as flooding the rivers with his life-giving semen and using the canals for transportation, while
Ennugi, one of the gods who conspired to send the flood against mankind, was inspector of canals.

The oldest evidence for ships with masts comes from southern Mesopotamia and
Kuwait and dates from the sixth millennium. Nonetheless, whereas environmental conditions in Egypt encouraged the use of sails, those in Mesopotamia did not. Not only do the Tigris and Euphrates flow faster than the Nile, over numerous rapids and shallows, but both their currents and the prevailing winds go from north to south making upstream travel very difficult. Consequently, the Mesopotamians developed vessels they could use to best effect on a river system that favored downstream navigation. Boats were an essential means of transportation, but they never achieved the status that they did among the Egyptians. The Mesopotamian boat was a thing of this life, never exalted enough to serve as a vehicle of the gods.

The earliest vessels for which any evidence survives were lightweight boats made of reeds or skins that ran less risk of hitting bottom in the shallows than would a heavier wooden boat and were less susceptible to damage if they did, and which could be easily towed upriver once their cargoes had been off-loaded. The Mesopotamians also made use of disposable rafts supported by either inflated animal skins or airtight
ceramic pots. When vessels reached their destination, they could be unloaded, their timber decking sold with the cargo, and the floats either sold or carried upstream to be used again. Watercraft of such simple design were employed well into the twentieth century, when one of the most common vessels found on the Tigris and among the
Marsh Arabs of the Shatt al-Arab was still the
quffa
, a circular boat of coiled reeds, like an enormous basket reinforced with wooden ribs and waterproofed with a coat of bitumen, or
asphalt pitch. These materials may suggest fragility, but a
quffa
could carry as much as three horses and their handlers, or five tons of cargo.

The record of Mesopotamian maritime accomplishment also differs significantly from that of Egypt. Although there is an abundant supply of economic texts such as contracts and orders or receipts for goods, merchant seals, and illustrations, the only boat remains are
fragments of bitumen used to waterproof hulls. Models and pictures of vessels are scarce, and there are few sustained narratives describing the role of ships and navigation. Among the sources that do open a window on the maritime life of ancient Mesopotamia are the legends associated with the birth of
Sargon in the 2300s
BCE
and the
Epic of
Gilgamesh, a quasi-historical hero of the third millennium whose exploits remained popular in the Near East for more than two thousand years, and echoes of which can be found in the stories of
Moses,
Noah, and the flood in the
Hebrew
Bible;
Homer’s
Odyssey;
and
The Arabian Nights
.